Data traffic has grown dramatically in the recent years, leading to increased deployment of network service appliances and servers in enterprise, data center, and cloud environments. To address the corresponding business needs, network switch and router architecture has evolved to support multi-terabit capacity. However, service appliance and server capacity remained limited to a few gigabits, far below switch capacity.

Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is an innovative solution to bridge the performance gap between a multi-terabit switch and gigabit servers and appliances. It is an hardware based multi-terabit layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on the Nexus 7000 and 7700 series of switches.

It may sound strange to hear me say it, but when I wrote the previous blog post about Dynamic FCoE I thought that it may get a little blip of attention and then filed away as a “oh, that is cool” little factoid about Cisco’s storage portfolio. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so nonchalant, but I confess I was not expecting the number of questions that I (and other speakers at CiscoLive back in May) have been getting about the technology.

Many questions – including some in the comments of the previous blog – have indicated a strong desire to know more, and they have been excellent and well-thought out. I’m going to try to address some of them in a deeper dive blog whenever I can, in the hopes of being able to address some of the concerns and clarify some points.

We’ll start with one of the biggest concerns – sharing the spine layer for logical separation of SAN A/B, and what happens if one of the spine switches (nodes) go offline. Read More »

In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, we send the marketer in to chat with the technologist. Steve Shah (@steveshah) quizzes Nisarg Shah (@nisargcisco) around the use cases for NetScaler including load balancing in the Application Driven Data Center. Less talk, more TLAs! All will be explained, just watch and see:

The moral of this story, marketing and engineering finally agree, unicorns are hard to draw.

Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

As we start off this New Year, how about including a resolution to improve application delivery? In Best Practices for Application Delivery in Virtualized Networks – Part I , we covered key application delivery challenges that have come up due to the complexities of managing the many types of applications that enterprises use today, and further complicated by data center consolidation and virtualization. We then covered some best practices, courtesy of Dr. Jim Metzler’s 2011 Application Service Delivery Handbook, which recommended taking a lifecycle approach to planning and managing application performance.

A key step to the lifecycle approach is to implement network and application optimization tools, such as WAN Optimization solutions and Application Delivery Controllers, including server load balancers. Of course, these solutions are not new to the market and already address many of the needs that exist with delivering enterprise applications in virtualized data centers – namely, the need to ensure network reliability, availability and security for users accessing these applications. In this post, we will discuss a recent study by IDC, where IT decision makers across Europe and the US spoke out about their strategies for using server load balancers to deal with emerging challenges.

. What important attributes do you look for in your server load balancers?

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